I know that the forest was destroyed before the time of Berek. If it had not been it would have been difficult for Berek to get to Mt. Thunder after the battle. What I do not know is just the sequence of events. Did the forestals appear before or after the destruction of the forest? I will assume th...

I have looked at some of those sites, but they are mostly sites with either commercial DES software or they are functions for programming languages.

What I need is really a kind of DES calculator.

It's quite handy, since you can be more precise this way, can explain things in fewer words. In English, you don't know if a friend, teacher, whatever is male or female. In German, you know. But it must be a hell to learn ... German is nothing. :) German has four forms (kasus) of the substantives u...

It has been 15 years since I studied german now, but I still remember that there are different forms of the articles used. One for each gender and the plural forms. The norse 'R' form is something similar, showing that the name is being used in a specific manner. I have not read Hrolf Kraki's Saga, ...

I usually get bored by doing routine tasks that have no real meaning. Filling in forms when there is nothing to fill in them etc.

Ah, Snorre, I definitely have to get me a translation of the younger eddas.

Now for the linguistic angle: the "r" at the end is a specific form of the name. Unfortunately I cannot remember exactly what it means, but it only shows up in specific uses in sentences I think.

Does anyone here know of a program that I could download from somewhere that could do a simple DES encryption/decryption of a block of data with various keys?

It would be nice to have to test something at work.

I grew up on a farm with animals like cattle, a horse (filly), sheep and cats. Now I have moved to the city and have nothing in the way of animals. One of the reasons for this is that I am mildly allergic to various animals, especially horses. (Which probably is the most I have in common with Covena...

Ryzel, what did you think of the Fire and Ice books? I'd put them behind Covenant but ahead of everything else including Tolkein. I just love Martin's style. He doesn't shy away from any subject matter and isn't afraid to axe a character or two. What a refreshing change of pace from the formulaic d...

My initial assumption would be that your name is derived from "Thor" and "Stein" which I would take to mean Thor's Stone. I get the same result from www.behindthename.com, but if you have checked this before you already know this. And you would also be correct in assuming that Th...

Fist and Faith wrote:It says "The time now is Sat Feb 15, 2003 11:16 pm", and there are 8 of us online right now!! That's the most I've seen at once.

Over here it says:
Sun Feb 16, 2003 12:18 am

If you had to guess, you'd be right. :) My guess was just plain laziness as I was sitting four feet away from my copy of the norwegian translation of the elder Eddas. :) However a check in the elder edda shows that Gungne is described as Odin's sword in the comments to one of the poems. The spear i...

I like to take off my shoes, pull up my feet and sit cross-legged on my chair in front of my computer. That way I can rest my elbows on my knees/ankles when I lean forward.

I do not know if it should be considered weird or not.

I will just dispense with the quoting for now and answer your questions in one post. First: Viking mythology as such is not required in school, but the literature from which we get most of the information about it is partially on the required reading list for our schools so most people will recogniz...

My apartment is falling apart around me, but I cannot move because it is too expensive. :-x Anyway 350k USD will probably NOT get you a house of any reasonable quality here in Oslo where the prices are very high. (A three bedroom apartment around where I live go for about 250k, if you only convert t...

I can speak norwegian. And with some effort I could probably manage swedish and danish as well, the languages of scandinavia are very similar.

I can manage a few words in german and I speak english.

Sometimes it's tough getting into a story, for whatever reason. I restarted Atlas Shrugged recently, the first time I got about 250 pages into the book when I got sidetracked. I've been told that I put the book down just before it got good. About the time when Hank Rearden was introduced was when I...

I'm not thinking Kevin should have <I>hid</I> the information. I'm thinking that the space in the First Ward that was taken up with information about white gold could have been used for something that the people would have had any hope of using/finding. I see. Well this might be because the prophec...

I cannot see that there is any support for saying that there were no deceit in the Land. Actually I see plenty of it in the chronicles. What the people of the Land had was the ability to see how healthy something was, but the ability did not include abstracts like truth.

But where did he get stuff to feed them all. Maggot pits?